A face-to-face approach to web standards education

It all started when I visited my city's website,
and had the pleasant surprise to see the "valid HTML" and "valid CSS" icons there.

The initial enthusiasm quickly lead me to think how pathetic
it was to be enthusiast just because, for once, I had
found a valid webpage that wasn't owned/written by a geek
[note].

Why do geeks validate their webpages? Because they're cool,
because they're good and conscientious web citizens. Of course.
But certainly they did that because they know someone who has a friend
who knows another person that has been at a conference with a speaker who
read a book by someone who once heard about the validator, or read an
article. Or something like that.

The point is, web geeks do validate because someone convinced them to do
so. Of course "web geeks" are easier to convince than "web designers"
(sorry if this sounds pejorative), but there are other ways to ease the
education work than "good will". Starting with proximity.

It's always easier to convince someone when you can discuss with
this person in front of a coffee. Those of us who have tried to explain
"why this is the right way" by sending a 'nice, polite, informative
e-mail with loads of links to comprehensive resources' know that
face-to-face dialog is a more efficient medium for pedagogy than most
remote methods.

Think globally, Act locally

The web and the Peter Pan complex

The web has started out of chaos. One of the reasons why the web has
had its early success is that the technologies (not named standards at the
time) were very loose, basically anyone could throw an HTML-ish page on
a server and it would work. Web technologies have matured into web standards,
and the web should follow. The web should grow up.

The problem is, the web doesn't want to grow up, because it's not funny
becoming an adult when everyone remains a child.

When so few (none?) among the "bigger" sites make a proper use of web
technologies, it's not easy convincing people that they should.
In other words, if we want to beat the "I don't care about valid HTML
(or other web standards), no-one does" logic, we need to find
a base of sites that are likely to cooperate, so that we can show them
as "good examples".

Finding a proper target

"Public" sites are a good target, for two reasons.

Proximity : you can actually go see the person in charge of the
website and offer to help

Quality constraints : it may sound manichean, but where the private
sector is driven by marketing (hence the "go to hell, my customer
base uses IE5/NS4/your-browser-here" typical answer), the public
sector has some obligations towards quality. A few examples :
section 508
for accessibility of government-funded websites in the USA,
or the new-Zealand web guidelines.

Starting local initiatives

There is space for a nice initiative where volunteers would
convince local authorities to improve the quality of their websites,
and possibly helping them to do so.

An annex project would be to author a paper with two parts : advice
for the "evangelist" (like "be friendly - remember : you're here to
help" or "try to find some local data for your argumentation"), and key
information for the "people in charge" in public administrations.

Post-Scriptum

Acknowledgements

The editors want to thank the following people for their contribution:

Karl Dubost and Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, W3C, for their initial input

Terje Bless, for the idea of making this article out of the e-mail message, and the title idea